On the Horizon: Desiring Global Queer and Trans* Studies in International and Intercultural Communication

Abstract

***** Throughout my U.S.-based undergraduate and graduate trainings between 2001 and 2011, I did not feel fully at home majoring in “Intercultural Communication.” Topics such as intercultural transition; identity negotiation and relationships; language and performance; nonverbal codes and cultural spaces; migration and citizenship; and globalization and popular culture, represented my lived experiences of being an international student from Japan, who every day navigates the politics of difference in USAmerica. However, I always questioned and, quite frankly, did not understand why the field of Intercultural Communication had overlooked queer issues and concerns of sexuality, sex, and gender in its knowledge productions. As I live my queer of color life, I can neither easily separate nor conveniently compartmentalize intersectional, multidimensional aspects of who I am, what I do, and how I make sense of what I do in relation to people around me. My sexuality, sex, and gender are central to my cultural identities and orientations. Hence, bringing the personal to the political, I developed a love-hate relationship with Intercultural Communication. However, my love-hate relationship with Intercultural Communication began to change when Chávez (2013) called for Queer Intercultural Communication to be published in this very journal. She explicitly opened up possibilities for disrupting the unspoken and unwritten circumferences of Intercultural Communication that privileged the logic of cisheterosexuality working with whiteness, patriarchy, capitalism, and more. Chávez (2013) stated, “Within what is recognizable as [I]ntercultural [C]ommunication scholarship, [Q]ueer studies have been marginal... In this very journal, a search of all available issues reveals no mention of queer or transgender on its pages” (p. 84). Thus, Chávez’s call made space to showcase possibilities of what Queer Intercultural